Gang smuggled cocaine to Europe in torpedoes bolted to ships
French police chief calls tactic ‘worthy of James Bond’
PARIS A smuggling ring has been caught sending cocainefilled torpedoes bolted to cargo ships from South America to Europe’s largest port, where frogmen waited to pick them out of the water.
Three French divers were arrested this month as they prepared to dive under a cargo boat in Rotterdam.
Attached to the hull was a missile-shaped container carrying 101 kilos of pure cocaine worth close to $9.4 million Cdn.
The chief of the Nice, France judicial police, who led the sting operation, described the technique — never seen before in Europe — as “worthy of James Bond” and warned that it could be in use in other European ports.
Narcotics agents first heard of the scheme one night last June, when port police fished four divers with an underwater propulsion vehicle out of the water near Fos-sur-Mer, an oil port on France’s Mediterranean coast.
“Our initial reaction was: are they shooting a scene from an action movie?” said Philippe Frizon, the Nice police chief.
The divers were released, but police soon realized these were no ordinary frogmen.
Two were linked to Marco Armando, 56, who is thought to be one of the masterminds of a robbery in 1992 in which 146 million francs were stolen from a branch of the Bank of France. He was sentenced to 18 years in prison in 1996 but released in 2005.
Police kept up surveillance as more underwater reconnaissance missions were conducted.
“When we saw these people training with autonomous diving gear, submersibles and inflatable parachutes to refloat heavy objects from the depths, we wondered what are they up to?” Frizon told The Daily Telegraph. “Given some of these people’s past form in Europe’s criminal underworld and their sudden taste for tourism in South America, we decided to take a much closer look.”
Police tracked Armando for a year, finally trailing him and two associates as they drove from southern France to Rotterdam via Paris and Antwerp on April 16 in rented cars loaded with heavy diving equipment. Tipped off by their French colleagues, Dutch police arrested the suspects and seized their gear, including two propulsion vehicles and inflatable parachutes.
In a metal cradle attached to the hull of the Delta Laguna, a Dutch cargo ship that departed from Venezuela with a stop in Curaçao in the Caribbean, police found a rusting torpedometal tube over 2.5 metres long, stuffed with cocaine worth up to $9.4 million on the street.
Nine other suspects were arrested in France — two in Corsica, five in Nice, one in Marseille and one in Toulouse. Police found weapons and a cocaine workshop.
Frizon said drug police in Colombia and Peru had alerted him to the torpedo technique three years ago.
“We knew drug cartels were looking for safer ways of transporting their wares. Air travel is problematic when it passes via Africa while cargo ships are at the mercy of customs checks on the surface.
“Another ploy was to attach drug-filled mini-submarines to the back of cargo vessels via a metal cable, but these were easily spotted. So they developed this new method.”
He said the cocaine came from Peru and Colombia and was likely destined for sale in Paris and the south of France.